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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
BRID_030529_014.JPG: I thought this was a useful chart. It shows you relative ages of rock, the names of the rock, and which national parks are evidence of that rock. The Natural Bridges features are considerably older than those found at Monument Valley or Arches National Park.
BRID_030529_015.JPG: The bridge shown here is the Sipapu Bridge. The bridge is the largest in the park. The opening has a height of 220 feet and a span of 268 feet. They like to tell you that the dome of the US Capital could almost fit inside it, These pictures were taken from the overlook. Other pictures will follow from the trail.
BRID_030529_026.JPG: Some Indian ruins can be seen in the crevice.
BRID_030529_033.JPG: Another view of the Sipapu Bridge. You can clearly see the stream here.
BRID_030529_079.JPG: These are the Horsecollar Ruins which were inhabited by the Anasazi between 1050AD and 1300AD. It's considered unusual because it has both round and square kivas, the ceremonial chamber of the Indians, representing two different architectural styles. The presumption is that two different groups of Anasazi occupied the dwellings, creating new kivas as their traditions dictated. According to the web site, they are "one of the best-preserved ancestral Puebloan sites in the area. Named because the doorways to two structures resemble horsecollars, the site was abandoned more than 700 years ago. Its remarkable state of preservation, including an undisturbed kiva with the original roof and interior, is likely due to the isolation of Natural Bridges: few visitors ever made the journey down these canyons. ... The Horsecollar Site was discovered by non-Indians in the late 1880's. In 1907, an archeological expedition documented the site and later recommended the establishment of Natural Bridges National Monument (which was founded the next year). Sometime thereafter, Horsecollar Ruin seems to have been forgotten. One cold November day in 1936, it was rediscovered by Zeke Johnson, the first curator of the Monument."
BRID_030529_100.JPG: This is the Kachina Bridge. It's named for Indian petroglyphs at the base of it. Its opening is 210 feet high and 204 feet wide. To the left of the picture is where the meandering stream used to run. Over time, however, the stream eroded a hole through the wall and the stream jumped its tracks, abandoning the branch, to form the bridge.
BRID_030529_115.JPG: This is the Owachomo Bridge. It's the Hopi name for "rock mound", one of which is located near the bridge. The opening is 106 feet high, 180 feet wide. It was the easiest one to walk to. To get an idea of scale, look for the guy standing in the middle of the opening.
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Wikipedia Description: Natural Bridges National Monument
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Natural Bridges National Monument is a U.S. National Monument located in southeast Utah, in the western United States. It features the second and third largest natural bridges in the world.
The elevation ranges from 1,700 to 2,000 m (5,500 feet to 6,500 feet). At higher elevations pinyon-juniper forests grow, giving way to shrubs and grasses at lower elevations. In the canyons, where there is more water, there are willow and cottonwood trees.
Natural bridges are formed through erosion by moving water. The remaining rock spans the canyon like a bridge, hence the name. The three bridges in the park are named Kachina, Owachomo and Sipapu, which are all Hopi names.
History:
In 1904 the National Geographic Magazine publicized the bridges and the area was designated a National Monument April 16, 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt. It is Utah's first National Monument.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!